John Adams

City Noir etc

ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra/marin Alsop

Naxos 8.559935 69:06 mins

Stereotyped thinking would suggest that no Viennese orchestra should relinquish waltzing for an album whose cover is emblazoned with an aerial shot of the Los Angeles sprawl glistening at night. But the ORF Vienna

Radio Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor, remember, is Marin Alsop, and she guides them through this programme of ultra-american music by John Adams with typical dedication and vim.

If the main piece, City Noir, from 2009, doesn’t convince as it should, the fault lies not with the versatile orchestra or the committed Alsop but with Adams himself, who seems so hypnotised by his vision of LA as a ‘film noir’ city of dark shadows and unease that he lets his overworked and fidgety tapestry spread over a half-hour symphonic canvas without the necessary musical argument or architecture to provide sufficient structural support. Jazzy or lurid solos for trombone, alto sax and trumpet come and go, but little momentum is achieved until the final frenzied onslaught.

Happily, the album also contains the more abstract and exuberant delights of Fearful Symmetries (1988), a work almost as long, but closer to Adams’s minimalist beginnings and audibly written in Nixon in China’s shadow, with textured pulsing patterns brilliantly sustained by a conductor and orchestra who never flag. This work demands repeated hearings. I can’t really say the same for the itchy and scratchy Lola Montez Does the Spider Dance, written in 2016 to honour Alsop’s long tenure directing the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. But it does last only five minutes.

PERFORMANCE ★★★

RECORDING ★★★★